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Peace Operations

After a more than a decade of continuous expansion, historic levels of demand and increasing operational complexity pose risks to the viability of peace operations. Setbacks in high-profile missions have coincided with military overstretch and growing fiscal austerity, while missions that have achieved interim stability lack a clear transition strategy towards sustainable peacebuilding and development. At the same time, the evolving use of a range of alternative models of peace operations, including the hugely expanded use of special political missions, is both creating new options and adding complexity to policy debates. At the UN and elsewhere, new questions about the relative merits of traditional peacekeeping versus lighter options create an ongoing demand for policy-relevant research. CIC aims to provide analysis on these issues and to improve conceptual and operational linkages across political missions, peacekeeping operations, and peacebuilding.

Related Publications

Impact Investment. Social Entrepreneurship. Corporate Partnerships. We’ve all heard these buzz words, but what do they actually mean? How can they be effectively applied to finance sustainable peace efforts in some of the world’s most difficult conflict areas?

In the first of this two-part article series, CIC Visiting Scholar Riva Kantowitz delves into the innovative methods and models that are being applied to fund global conflict prevention and peacebuilding efforts. The article also raises important challenges to these methods, including the impact of the funding and how it is being used on the ground.

An integrated approach to crisis and conflict prevention requires clarity on what is meant by prevention, and how the concept of prevention fits with the 2030 Agenda, sustaining peace, and other relevant frameworks. This new briefing paper by Sarah Cliffe and David Steven proposes a new paradigm for prevention that has three levels: (i) universal prevention strategies that aim to build healthy societies that manage conflict productively, provide safety and security, increase resilience, and enhance social, political, and economic inclusion; (ii) “at risk” prevention strategies that target groups, communities, and countries that face elevated risk of conflict, or where violence is highest and resilience lowest; and (iii) prevention strategies that are tailored to situations of ongoing conflict or crisis.

More than 20 years have passed since the United Nations (UN) first committed to achieving gender parity in its managerial and decision-making positions, but the organization still has a long way to go. Karin Landgren, a former senior UN official, provided the data two years ago to show that gender parity at the UN had become a “lost agenda” under the previous Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon. And in spite of a push to have a woman at the top of the UN hierarchy for the first time, the front runners in the Security Council straw polls for a new Secretary-General were largely men. (Perhaps Wonder Woman would have stood a better chance.) Yet the new Secretary-General, António Guterres, seems determined not only to talk about change but to effect it. After ensuring a 50/50 split in his own appointments at the senior level, Guterres has released this week the report of the Gender Parity Task Force: a far-reaching “System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity,” which does not pull any punches in describing the current situation for women trying to make a career inside the UN bureaucracy.

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Past Events

Paige Arthur, CIC Deputy Director, was a member of a distinguished panel of peacebuilding practitioners for the Initiative for Peacebuilding through Education’s 2017-18 academic year kickoff event, “Has Peacebuilding Failed? The Shift to Sustaining Peace”. The event was held at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs on September 15, 2017.

The people of South Sudan is suffering under a terrible man-made catastrophe where millions have fled from their homes and many face starvation. Ending the three-year-old civil war is the first step to solve the crisis, but negotiations, led by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), have faltered.